Archive of Our Own

Demi sighed. “Is there a drawer for me?”

“Bottom one’s yours, I didn’t get a chance to put anything in it after the last girl, so feel free. If you’ve got any weed or anything special, you probably want to stash it somewhere else, though.”

“I don’t— I’m not into drugs, I don’t have weed!” Demi said, and she didn’t. She did have thirty Adderall from her last home, since their son refused to take it and Demi wasn’t about to pass up an emergency cash source. But that wasn’t, like, illegal. 

Michelle shrugged without looking up. “I’m just saying, watch out for your shit if you don’t want to lose it.” With that, she seemed to have exhausted her social energy and therefore unlikely to share any more advice. Demi unloaded her clothes from her suitcase into the drawer; all of them fit into just the one drawer.

And then the next day, when she came back to the house from her first day at yet another new school, all of her clothes were gone: her jeans were replaced with corduroy skirts and her t-shirts had become button-up blouses. Michelle walked in and slung her backpack onto her bed as Demi was frantically digging through the drawer. “Did you fuck with my stuff?” she demanded. 

When the woman finally left, to go bother the boys’ bedroom which also had a new resident, Demi turned to Michelle. “You know, you could have been a little more helpful with your warning,” she hissed.

“I was,” said Michelle, flopping over onto her bed. “You’ve got to think fast and don’t trust whoever’s in charge of you. If you can’t figure that out, then nothing I say can help you.” She tilted her head. “You’re a decent ass-kisser, though, you might make it.”

“Yeah, best ass-kisser, that’s my big ambition in life.”

Later, when Michelle was using her scheduled fifteen minutes of bathroom time, Demi checked the floor vent grate where she’d hidden the pills, the locket with her grandmother’s picture in it, a folding knife, and the little notebook into which she taped pictures and movie ticket stubs and anything else that ever made her happy. (It wasn’t a diary. Diaries were too easy to read, she wasn’t that dumb.) It was all still there, and Demi let out a sigh of relief she hadn’t known she’d been holding ever since she opened up her drawer. 

So for three months, Demi wore long skirts and buttoned shirts to school, sold ADHD pills to desperate overachievers, used some of the money to go to the thrift store and put together a secret wardrobe to change into in the school bathroom, and pasted on a smile that showed teeth every time her foster mother talked to her. And at night, once a week, she and Michelle would sneak out and go down to the dirt bike track on the edge of town behind the gas station, where teenage boys spun donuts in their shitty cars and amateur mechanics put engines on things that almost definitely shouldn’t have them. 

It was where Michelle taught Demi how to ride a motorcycle, one they borrowed off the guy who’d bought Michelle a Coke. They went slow, because there was only one helmet, but Demi gripped the handles with all the strength she had and found some kind of new delight rising in her, through the fear, as the ground passed beneath them and the wind tossed her hair, and Michelle scooted up close behind her and held her tight. She wanted to stay in that moment. The bullshit of her current foster home was something she could stand, if she could just have this. If she could just come back every week to this, with Michelle’s hands resting so easily on her hips. 

After that first ride, she peeled the label off the Coke bottle she and Michelle had shared and taped it in her notebook. 

And then three months in, one of the boys in the house ratted her out to the principal at their school, and her Adderall operation was uncovered. Demi had no idea how he’d even known, but it didn’t matter, once word had got around. The principal talked to her foster mother, who sat her down to explain why her social worker would be taking Demi to a new family. 

“I won’t have drugs in this house, Demi. I know you probably thought you were helping people, but someone could get seriously hurt taking that.”

Demi had thought of it more as ‘providing a service at a cost’ more than ‘helping people’ but sure, whatever. She wiped at her dry eyes. “I’m sorry, someone had given them to me at my old school and I don’t use them so I thought other people could, but I won’t do it again, I promise.” She didn’t love this house, but she was settled. She could find a new revenue stream than dealing prescription drugs.

“I just can’t have someone living in this house who doesn’t share our values. There are the other children to consider as well, and it’s my duty to raise as many children as I can on a righteous path, trusting the Lord for healing, instead of letting them trade their faith in the Lord’s power for faith in man’s medicines.” Her foster mother laid a hand on hers and smiled pityingly. 

Demi kept her jaw from dropping, but with an effort. Apparently dealing pills wasn’t an issue. Yes, they’d all gone to Sunday School and regular service on long Sunday mornings, and yes, when one of the boys had caught a cold there was no trip to the doctor, but Demi had assumed that was due to concerns about antibiotic overuse or more probably, just being cheap. She realized suddenly that she’d never seen so much as a bottle of Tums in the house. 

“I, uh, have faith,” she tried, but it sounded fake even in her own ears. 

When she moved out this time, she left the skirts for the next girl, crumpled her thrift store clothes and her toothbrush into her school backpack, and pulled her notebook and knife and locket out of the vent. Michelle came in while she was packing and watched silently. “You were right about the suitcase,” Demi said, and headed for the door. 

Michelle didn’t respond, just grabbed her and pulled her into a tight hug. “Good luck out there,” she said, her voice rough. “When you get yourself a motorcycle, don’t forget who taught you how to ride.” She pressed her lips to Demi’s forehead, barely a kiss because Michelle wasn’t gentle enough for things like that. 

“Never,” Demi promised her, and squeezed back hard.

+++++

The next time Demi saw Michelle was three years later, when Michelle was brought by her social worker to the group home Demi was living in. Neither of them had gotten any taller. 

“Okay, Michelle got here a day earlier than expected, so until we can go pick up the bed she’s going to have tomorrow, somebody needs to share.” The group home’s director, a sturdy woman named Janice, looked around the circle of seven teenaged girls. “I’m not asking you to give up a kidney, I know at least one of you is considerate enough just for one night." 

“She can share with me,” Demi offered, trying to sound disaffected. Michelle hadn’t made any signal that they knew each other, so Demi wasn’t going to give that away until she knew what the situation was. “I don’t kick much.” 

“My shins appreciate it,” Michelle responded flatly. 

Later that night, when the girl Demi shared a room with was emitting a soft buzz of a snore, Demi rolled onto her side to face Michelle, who was staring up at the ceiling like she’d never blink again. “So where’ve you been?” she whispered.

“Couple of places,” Michelle answered, finally turning her head. “Few months in juvie when a guy giving me a ride had a bunch of cocaine in his car. I’m going to be eighteen in a few months, then I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore.” 

“I’ve still got more than a year,” Demi said.  

“Maybe not,” said Michelle, and gave Demi on of her rare smiles. 

There was a transitional housing program, and a dizzying array of counselors and social workers and people neither of them could identify, but by the end of it, Michelle had a GED, Demi had a diploma, and they both had an apartment. It wasn’t very big, and none of the windows fit right so the cold came right in. But it was theirs and they had no more people calling themselves parents to answer to. 

But there wasn’t much money. Not until Michelle came home one day while Demi was eating dinner at the wobbly kitchen table they’d rescued from someone’s curb, and told Demi the truth about her trip to juvie: the reason the cocaine was in the car was because she had put it there. And while the guy who’d put Michelle up to it was serving ten years for other offenses, his boss, or maybe his boss’s boss, was impressed with her.

“Look, I know I had that whole Adderall thing when I was fourteen, but that was just for spending money. You know I don’t need everything to be totally legit to consider it, I just don’t want to fuck with anyone who carries around their cocaine in bricks instead of little baggies.” She shot Michelle a look, daring her to argue with her. 

“No, I feel you,” Michelle said, “I only did it the once because my juvie record would get sealed. Drugs are for idiots, you don’t have to go to jail to make that much money. Nah, there are companies, businesses hire them to get information, and tell them if what they want to do is a good idea or not. Those are the suits with the real money. But they sometimes need people who go out and… get what they need.”

Demi chewed on her lip, looking down at her third bowl of ramen in the past two days. “I don’t know whether that sounds more like theft or spying. Which, again, I didn’t get out of foster homes early just to trade it for a jail cell.” 

Michelle sat down next to Demi, and put a hand on her knee. “I wouldn’t do that to you. To us. This is legit, Demi. They’ve got expensive lawyers, they can talk their way out of anything. And they want us.”

“They don’t know me.”

“I said I wouldn’t work without you. That you’re my backup and my partner and the cocaine thing wouldn’t have gone south if it’d been you there with me.”

The next weeks and months are a dizzying trip into a corporate world Demi didn’t know existed, but felt like she always should have expected. Respectable men in suits and women who knew six languages creating reports, while sending retired special forces guys and ex-cons and anyone else who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty out into the world. You didn’t have to work for the government to be a spy. You didn’t have to work for anyone at all, and Demi found her first paycheck was higher than the three months of pay she’d gotten once while working checkout in a grocery store; all she’d had to do for it was collide with a congressional staffer and grab some papers that fell out of his bag. 

It was something different, each time. A theft here, planting bugs in an office there, personally delivering an envelope from one place to another, getting photos of a man meeting with his mistress. Demi liked the jobs she could do with Michelle, even if it wasn’t very glamorous to dress up as the night cleaning crew to thoroughly go through an office; they’d speak Spanish when the latest businessmen would linger and finally leave, knowing they looked as anonymous as any other Latina janitors. 

In time, they had their own motorcycles. They bought a house together. At some point between the group home and the new jobs, they’d started holding hands when sleeping together, and then kissing hello and goodbye, and then… then it was them, together, and that was that. (In some hazy memory of the past, Demi could remember, maybe, daydreaming about a husband someday; this, though— this was real, and it seemed like they had always been meant to converge like this and she couldn’t imagine a life without Michelle at her side.)

The operations got longer as time went on; Demi grew accustomed to wearing heels and makeup as more jobs involved her being a temp,  gathering information from the companies clients wanted secrets from. It was here that Demi learned how much easier it was to hack people than computers: stress them out a bit and tell them you can’t do your job without a certain level of access, and it was almost too simple to watch them open the door to the most private networks. 

Michelle, on the other hand, was not assigned the office jobs. She was sometimes sent out with the special ops guys, or not with anyone at all. Her assignments weren’t during business hours. She got good at reading property records and building specs; their dining room table was frequently covered with rolled-out blueprints. Michelle had never been bigger than distinctly petite, but Demi didn’t comment as she watched Michelle’s softer curves diminish and be replaced with hard muscle and sharp elbows. 

But that wasn’t the real difference. Demi couldn’t say what the real change in Michelle was by a year or two after they started this line of work, but Michelle was talking less, and smiling less. Their date nights started to involve more delivery and fewer fancy restaurants in the city. When they were walking anywhere, Michelle would compulsively brush her hair back from her face while turning her head, the move they both knew to subtly check for anyone tailing them. Demi could never see anyone there, though, and as time passed Michelle didn’t stop looking for watchers. 

When she started saying things about everybody following someone’s orders, no matter who they were, Demi finally said something. 

“We started doing this so that nobody gets to be in charge of us,” she said. “We’re consultants, contractors. They don’t even employ us. If you don’t like what they’re telling us to do, we can leave. Go somewhere else. I’ve had offers, I know you have too.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Michelle, but she wouldn’t say why. Even when Demi brought up some of the opportunities she’d heard about —ex-military turned private security and looking to move into lobbying and starting their own defense contracting firm from one, corporate counter-espionage consulting from another— Michelle waved her off irritably and said that wasn’t the answer. 

Demi stopped pushing the issue, with the sense that she wasn’t asking the right questions to find out what was going on with Michelle. She hoped it would pass, in time; it sat between them, some weight in their bed that she couldn’t quite reach over. When they kissed goodnight, she held on to Michelle for just a second more of sweetness. Michelle seemed as if she were steeling herself for something, but when she thought she was unobserved, Demi caught her looking hopeless, and pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. 

If there was something she could do, she didn’t know. She threw herself into work, choosing assignments for which she and Michelle could work together, them against the world like it had been for so long. There was one long job, infiltrating a defense contractor that built planes. The job had nothing to do with the company itself; it was all about hidden financial records keeping the board in the dark about the loss of top secret government contracts and bulking out the cut in revenue with layoffs and even more funding to a years-overdue project. The only question was when the secret would come out and sent stocks tumbling. 

Michelle established herself with the night surveillance crew, using her smoke breaks to make copies of the keys to each of the executives’ offices and access cards for the upper floors. Demi became part of the mailroom, delivering endless envelopes from one floor to another. Finally, on one late work night, the chance finally came. Demi took the key Michelle had made and let herself into the office with the secret files, picking the lock on the file cabinet and slipping the specific file labeled “3rd Quarter Board Report” into an envelope, anonymous among the rest of the envelopes she had in her cart. She finished her deliveries as normal, looking like nothing out of the ordinary for the security cameras. Then she sedately made her way down to the loading dock where her contact, the firm’s client, waited for her. 

The envelope was barely in her contact’s hand when the lights all went on, and a multitude of voices shouted at them to get on the ground. 

Demi had her cheek pressed to the dirty concrete floor when a pair of small combat boots came into her line of vision. She looked up. 

Michelle pointed at Demi, and said, “There she is. I’ve been tracking her for months.”  

Later, Demi would find out that the file had been plans for a new fighter jet, and the recipient had been a Chinese agent, and Demi, it turned out, had very much violated the Espionage Act. “What the fuck?” she demanded at Michelle as she was handcuffed. “Michelle, what the fuck are you doing, we didn’t talk about this!” 

Michelle’s face was hard. “Like I told you. You gotta watch out for your shit, if you don’t want to lose it." 

Demi didn’t know what she was talking about this time any more than she had known the first day they met. But she had five years in a prison cell to ponder it, and every way she could get an answer out of Michelle when she got the chance. 

She was determined she would. 

 +++++

Now, after five years of shitty prison food and thin mattresses, they give her the chance to bring Michelle in, in exchange for her own freedom, and she almost doesn’t need the pardon to motivate her. 

The brand doesn’t hurt enough to truly notice. She’s got enough five years of pent up cold fury to push her through the other side of pain. When she gets out and tracks down the hanger where the base of operations exists, Michelle just smirks at her the whole time Demi’s taking down her men; Demi’s fury runs hot then, and threatens to choke her when it turns out to have been a setup. Michelle hauls her back to the man who released her, with the promise of a lifetime sentence now added to her time served. 

Michelle shows nothing on her face the whole time, no sign of what affection Demi once thought they held for each other. She thought she’d gotten over the betrayal, the pain of it, and had moved into only anger. When Demi is put into shackles and hoisted onto the prison transport, Michelle does give her a smile, one that mirrors of the man who had said she’d be pardoned. The only time Michelle stops that awful cold smile that doesn’t reach her eyes is when the prison transport stops and it’s just the two of them, on the side of the road. 

Demi doesn’t know if she means to show off her brand when she pushes her sleeve up. Maybe it’s something in the way Michelle isn’t mocking her for blocking punches with her face, like she used to do when they sparred. Maybe she just wants it over faster, and the only way to lose defiantly is to show that she never had a fighting chance in the first place. 

Then Michelle shows an identical brand on her arm, a sign that she’s being used by the man in charge too. Don’t trust whoever’s in charge of you, Michelle had warned her years ago, and Demi suspects she can see the pieces of a story she never knew coming together. A story that starts with two teenage girls in a foster home, with one of them trying to protect the other with casual hints and vague warnings.  And it was possible, just barely, that maybe she’d never stopped protecting her. 

They shake on it, and Michelle’s thumb brushes against Demi’s hand in a way that reminds her how long she’s been starved for that touch. Michelle’s eyes are deep and brown and tired and have, just enough for Demi to see, the tiniest bit of hope. It’s enough to agree to team up and tear it all down together. It’s a look she saw when Michelle was fifteen.

And then, in the aftermath, it’s just them and their motorcycles, and too many years since that first ride. 

+++++

They run. Then they stop running. They talk, maybe for the first time. Demi tells Michelle about her parents’ problems that drove her to her grandmother’s house until she lived there permanently, until her grandmother went into the hospital and didn’t come back. Michelle told Demi about the circle of “cousins”, some of which were maybe even biological relations, that toughened her up through her childhood. Michelle gives Demi the key to the safe deposit box where she hid Demi’s locket and notebook of memories, the one that still has a faded Coke label in it. 

Sometimes they make up by not talking at all. 

The truth comes out in fits and starts. Michelle had found out that the firm they contracted for had been secretly bought out, going from an independent corporate intelligence business to the private security force of an over-ambitious Congressman who had risen on the power of blackmail and secrets, all while becoming incredibly wealthy and cultivating a circle of like-minded officials. Michelle wasn’t supposed to know any of this, which was when she started noticing she was being watched. That they were being watched. She evaded suspicion and kept her head down, but eventually the signs grew impossible to ignore: the people at the top knew what she knew, and they wanted her dead, and Demi with her. Any knowledge of the cabal in charge by someone not a part of it was reason to get rid of them, and though Michelle knew it was too late for her, she thought that maybe, she could at least save Demi. 

That was when she’d moved their cash into anonymous account offshore and called the FBI. Michelle, of course, was just as implicit in passing the jet schematics along, and she’d gone to prison as well, expecting every day to be found bleeding out in the showers or hanged in her cell. But the years passed, and she lived on, keeping her mouth shut. Until the day the Congressman had come to see her himself, carrying a sheaf of papers promising her freedom from both prison and his cabal, if only she’d sign his non-disclosure agreement and bring in Demi.

Demi, he had said, was systematically working her way through the firm, killing everyone in her way up to the top, intent on revenge after escaping prison. She was going to be brought in by somebody, dead or alive. Michelle signed instantly, to make sure she’d be the one. 

It hurts, then, knowing how many years she spent hating Michelle. Michelle kisses her again and again, telling her that she’d rather Demi were alive and hated her than being dead from loving her. Demi knows that it will be a long time before she forgives herself for her lack of faith in Michelle, the only person who’d ever loved her.

Together, they start a new firm. They know how to do this, how to not bend the rules the way they’d been bent in half. And when girls come out of foster homes, uncertain and snarling, they let them know the the world is bigger than they’ve seen. They tell them they have a chance like any other asshole out there with family connections to work. Because they do have a family, whether they know it or not. 

And on the weekends? On the weekends, they drive down the coast, taking turns on the back of the bike, holding close to each other’s waist with the fresh salt wind in their faces and the comforting weight of their hands. 

They belong to no one, not anymore.